From bits spoken to a couple years back, I surmised it was to focus on his Doctorate and moving on in his career. I've seen him pop-in once or twice since, without posting. Perhaps sometime down the line he will stop by, say hi, & share a little what he's been up to. Whatever it is I would hazard to guess it will be on an extraordinary level.

Rman Virgil wrote:Few have v.1.10 and of those even fewer run it. I have it and do so very rarely (for testing, not for fun) because it frankly doesn't look good anymore - especially because of the current use of mip-maps in the v.2.x series and naturally the new terrain renderer in the 3.x series.

zydonk wrote: Psst (low voice from offstage), what about Aivolution, arguably the best mod ever made for WZ (profoundest respect to all post v1.n modders)? With a mod of that quality, looking good is only a minor matter. Good old school treachery better than cosy teaming for immersive gaming.

I agree, zydonk.

But remember Troman had to make changes to core v.1.10 for that great first iteration of AIvolution such that the Mod had to have it's own .exe calledv.1.10c (mainly Troman had to create "string support" which stock v.1.10 did NOT have and also create some additional functions to the script language itself. Hands-down, the best mod ever made for so many reasons.)

In any case, that does not take away from the point you made - that first iteration of AIvolution is reason enough to wanna still run v.1.10c no matter how good looking the current binaries are..

BTW.... the recent addition of CAM Transports to v.3.x was proceeded by providing Troman's source code for v.1.10c to see how he did it....

Before Troman left he was considering putting back in key components of that first iteration of AIvolution that he took out for his AIvolution work in the v.2.x series....

Lastly.... but not the least to be said here.... without Troman and Stratadrake's MOD (& proggy) work between 1999-2004..... WZ would have died in 1999 and we would never have made the efforts that led to the games open-sourcing. I have absolutely no doubt that judgement.

- RV

.

I assumed there were good reasons why the original Aivolution could not be brought over from v1.n, so I never pushed for it to be done. I had a bargy with Troman over rebalancing, but Aivolution demonstrated that he grasped the fundamentals of WZ better than most. WZ is near perfect so far as gameplay is concerned - was so from the beginning - but at the price of certain limitations with regards to terrain and what I can best call "game-stream" (mostly to do with limits in the human player - for instance, for every human decision, you could count possibly millions of AI decisions). Introducing teamplay was a definite advance, but extending this to the possibility of varying alliances during play was really an insight of genius, especially in allowing the AI itself to make and break alliances. This development utterly transformed WZ, forcing the player to concentrate on every little detail of his game and making it almost impossible to settle to a formula style play. You needed allies to survive, but you could never depend on them. Like Renaissance Italy; like politics any time, I daresay. Like life itself, come to think of it.

It says something about WZ that it can attract the kind of talent it does, who have given so much of their time and skills to bring the game up to date while yet holding to the original vision of WZ. An extraordinary achievement, perhaps unique in computer gaming.

Especially the caliber of talent and character the game attracted from the get go. As much as the game itself, that had a lot to do with my enduring interest and activity over the long haul.

While we did not talk about it all the time, back in the day, the subject did come up - making history in the annals of comp gaming. There was a strong sense about that from the very beginning. And it was part of the impetus, among other things, that carried the core group over the years during the "dry-spells" leading up to ultimate liberation.... & vindication for keeping the faith when the voices of ridicule and disparagement would rear their condescending heads and pronounce - "You fools, it ain't never gonna happen.".